by M. Raiya
“That will come out soon too,” Charlie said. “You’ll be on your feet before you know it.”
I would be very glad to have the tubes out, but I shivered at the thought of standing. After three years, would I even be able to walk? At least, thanks to Vin, I felt like I belonged in this body again, and all the bits seemed to move when I directed them to, but would my center of gravity and balance still work when I tried to stand?
As soon as Charlie was done, the gruff doctor, Locere, appeared. He decided I’d been breathing on my own long enough and apparently intended to keep doing it. With Charlie standing bracingly at my shoulder, Locere removed the ventilator. More like ripped it out, leaving my throat raw and sore. I decided on the spot his name should have been Lucifer. But I forgave him because it felt so good to have the thing gone. Granted, he put an oxygen mask over my mouth and nose, but that was nothing compared to the horrible tube.
Charlie elevated the head of my bed a little. For the first time, I could look down at my body under a white blanket. Human. I had a blood pressure cuff on my left arm and an oxygen monitor on my right forefinger, but I raised both hands to my face.
Me, I thought. This is me.
My cheekbones and nose felt more prominent than they used to, just as the bones were standing out in my hands and wrists. I had lost weight as an owl. But my arms had wiry muscles, and my body felt hard. My skin was very pale. My hair was still golden brown, though it was longer than it used to be, down to my shoulders. I had no beard, though. Most shifters had very little body hair in human form.
“Well?” Dr. Locere asked with a smile. “How do you feel?”
I drew a deep breath. This was it. My first real spoken conversation in three years.
“All right,” I managed to say through the oxygen mask. It still came out mostly air, and hurt. But it was words, and I was speaking.
“Are you feeling any pain?”
I nodded.
“In your back?”
I nodded.
“We’re giving you pain meds. On a scale of one to ten?”
“Four,” I mouthed.
“Okay. If it gets worse, let us know. Do you hurt anywhere else?”
I nodded, then pointed to my throat.
“That’s irritation from the ventilator,” he said.
Charlie had a cup of water with a straw in it. He removed the mask and held it to my lips. The first swallow hurt, but the next few felt better. God, I was drinking again! Actually swallowing!
“I don’t want you to talk much,” Dr. Locere said, “but I have a few questions for you. Firstly, your name is Gabriel Lane?”
I nodded.
“Can you tell me what year it is?”
“It’s 2017,” I managed to say in a voice that was slightly more than air. “June. No idea which day.”
“It’s Saturday. You’ve been here since Thursday. Good. Now, you have some very deep injuries to your back, which became infected. The infection entered your bloodstream and caused a condition known as sepsis. You were critically ill for a while, but the antibiotics are working, and we anticipate you will make a full recovery.” He smiled, and I realized I liked him despite his name.
“Do you have any idea what happened to you, Gabriel?”
I shrugged, remembering Vin’s story about the bear. “Hiking,” I said. “Can’t remember.” I shuddered.
“Okay, that’s fine. You have some deep claw marks on your back, and we think you were mauled by a bear. The police and game wardens want to talk to you when you’re ready. Will that be okay?”
I nodded.
“Now, this young man who’s been staying with you day and night. He said you didn’t have any immediate family to notify, and he said you were over eighteen, so we wouldn’t have contacted them anyway. Is this true?”
I nodded.
“You’re okay with Vin being here?”
I nodded again.
Dr. Locere and Charlie both laughed. “You seem pretty comfortable with him. Now, someone from the business office will be in at some point to discuss insurance with you. Do you have any questions for me?”
“How long here?” I whispered.
He shrugged. “You’re doing so well, probably a week or so. It’s always hard to say, but young people bounce back from these things fairly quickly.”
I nodded. A week, and I’d be—I shuddered as images of the great horned owl and my grandfather surged through my mind. I pushed them both away. Time to deal with that later.
Dr. Locere squeezed my shoulder and rose. As he and Charlie headed around the curtain, I saw that Vin was standing there silently, watching.
Our gazes locked.
The doctor and Charlie went out, talking softly. Vin didn’t move. His gaze burned into me. For the first time, I could speak to him. Really speak. And I had absolutely no idea what to say. There was so, so much I was feeling.
Vin slipped around the curtain and took a few steps toward me. A new awkwardness hung heavy between us. The chair on my right where he’d been sitting for so long was still there, but he didn’t sit. I missed the solid anchor of his hand that had gotten me through so much.
In this form I was a total stranger to him. A stranger to whom he had opened his soul. Now I needed to reassure him that he had not misplaced his trust.
I cast into my memory for what had worked the first time we’d been in this position. Willing up everything I had inside me, I whispered, “Hi.” Then I said, “Thank you chips.”
He gave a little laugh. “Shit, I can’t remember what I said.”
“You said ‘you’re welcome.’”
“Well, that was polite of me.”
I nodded and felt a surge of emotion building up inside me. “Thank you for saving my life.”
His face flushed. “Thank you for saving mine,” he said in a voice that was as faint as my own.
“I’m still your owl,” I whispered and held out both hands, palms toward him. He leaned forward and matched my gesture, pressing palms to palms. I had to close my eyes, letting the sensation of touch fill me, nerves in my fingers exploding into my brain, opening channels that hadn’t been used in so long. It was just like sensing air currents, I realized. Delicate, sensual, wonderful. I explored his hands with my fingertips, taking in the cautious, tentative touches back until I couldn’t take it any longer and let go. I lay back, breathing hard. This touching thing was going to take me a while to get used to again.
“Are you okay?” he asked quickly, glancing at the machines above me in case they were about to explode into flashing lights and alarms.
I nodded. “Just overwhelmed,” I managed to say.
He held both my hands carefully, suddenly a little hesitant about meeting my eyes.
I knew we were both thinking how, when I was so panicked, he’d said he loved me, and how that had brought me back into my body. Now was when I should tell him that what he had said meant a lot, but we should take this crazy situation slowly and see how everything wound up before saying anything like that to each other. But instead I said, “I love you too.”
His face went still. Maybe I’d presumed too much. Maybe he’d just said it to get me to come back; he hadn’t meant it in the literal sense. Or maybe he hadn’t thought I’d hear or remember.
I tried to hide my distress, but I was too newly back in this form to master subtle facial expressions. He looked at me for a moment longer, and then he bent and pressed his lips to my forehead again.
Reaching up with my right hand, I pulled off my oxygen mask.
“Hey,” Vin said in alarm, but I reached up with my other hand despite the resistance of the blood pressure cuff and got it behind Vin’s head. He froze for a moment, studying my eyes. Then I pulled his head gently down. Our lips met.
“Oh,” he whispered, pulling back. I tensed a little, but he was smiling, shakily. “You don’t know how much I’ve been dreaming of doing that,” he said.
I pulled his head back down. I’d never kissed
anyone before, not like this anyway, and I’d never envisioned my first kiss to be under these circumstances, but in a matter of seconds I had things figured out, and I’m sure I could have gotten a lot better if Vin hadn’t pulled away and replaced the oxygen mask.
“Dammit, you just came off a ventilator,” he hissed in my ear. “Now breathe deep.”
I was feeling light-headed, but I didn’t think it was from lack of oxygen. Still, I breathed deep and tried to get my mind around all the wonderful things that could be communicated without words, or even without much thought at all.
Vin shifted and dug something out of the pocket of the gray hoodie he was wearing. “I borrowed this from a nurse,” he said, and I saw he held a small, plastic mirror in his hand. “I thought you might want to see yourself. If you’re ready. I didn’t know.”
Yes. I nodded. He leaned forward and held it before my eyes. It wasn’t very clear, and there was some makeup smudge in one spot, but—me. My face. My human face. I stared. I knew my features had felt the way they always had to my fingertips. Thinner, like the rest of me. My cheeks were gaunt on either side of the oxygen mask. My eyes were still brown. But there was a kind of wary, tenseness that had never been there before. Wild, I thought. I looked lean and wild, like a predator. I’d come so close to losing myself to the wild altogether. How much longer would it have been before there had been nothing human left in my eyes?
But there was fear in my gaze too. I would be haunted by what had happened to me for the rest of my life.
I looked at Vin, and he put the mirror back in his pocket. “Okay?” he asked.
“I’m still me,” I whispered. I heard the awe in my voice.
He reached down and squeezed my shoulder gently. He understood.
Chapter Nine
I WAS starting to feel exhausted, but I pushed the urge to sleep aside when Vin scooted his chair a little closer and bent forward. I wanted to kiss him again, but he shook his head, glancing at a reading on the monitors I couldn’t see. “You need oxygen, and we need to talk,” he said in my ear. “Get our stories straight.”
I nodded regretfully.
“You do remember, right?” He looked uncomfortable again. “About what happened?”
The last thing I wanted to do was think about the great horned owl attack. I shuddered and then nodded toward the cup of water Charlie had left. I lifted my mask, and Vin held it for me while I painfully wet my throat. I knew I couldn’t do a lot of talking.
“That was a good idea—the bear story,” I said as Vin set the cup down and turned back to me. I resettled the mask. “As long as no poor bear gets killed over it. I’ll just pretend I don’t remember any of it, and when my pack and stuff never turn up, they’ll assume somebody stole it.”
Vin nodded. “Dr. Locere said that people can go out of their minds a little after a trauma like that, and with infection setting in. Nobody questions why you burst into the rehab center, which is right in the middle of the woods near the trail you were hiking.”
I rolled my eyes, thinking about what that scene must have looked like with me, naked, on poor Vin’s lap. Then I had another thought. “Nobody but you saw me shift, did they?”
He shook his head quickly.
“Thank God.” I closed my eyes a second, imagining what a fiasco that would have been. It was a wonder that Vin wanted anything to do with me at all. I pushed that thought aside and concentrated on where we were at. “Your parents? Do they know where you are?”
He shrugged. “Sort of. They knew I was coming down here to see the owl. I have my dad’s car. After everything happened, I called them and told them I wanted to stay a few days and watch you get released, and they were fine with me staying in a motel.”
Another thought slammed into me. “What about school? God, I haven’t cost you your graduation, have I?”
He shook his head. “No, no, it’s next week. I’m fine. This is exam week, and I’m exempt from all of them because I’ve got straight As.”
“Oh, good. Because you need to walk at your graduation, Vin.”
“It’s not that big a deal, if you’re not out of here by then.”
“Believe me, if you don’t do it, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, I’ll do it, and you’ll be there watching.”
“Okay.” I reshaped my thoughts. “Right. So the vet got the elan out. The moment I shifted, my grandfather would have known. That means—”
“Are you sure?”
“That he knows? He knows everything. He’ll come for me. Probably not here in the hospital, but as soon as I get out. And if he doesn’t, he can make me go to him. He can compel us to do anything.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, he can make it really unpleasant for us if we don’t do what he wants.”
“That’s barbaric! Are your leaders always like this?”
“I don’t know. He’s the only leader I can remember. But it’s justified because we have to keep our secret for the safety of the community. I get that. That’s why I didn’t question his right to do what he did to me.”
“Sorry,” Vin said, shaking his head. “I think that’s bullshit. I think he likes power too much.”
“We aren’t a democracy,” I said. The joy of Vin’s kiss was fading. I knew we wouldn’t have long to enjoy each other’s company. Probably, for Vin’s sake, I should send him away now and never have more contact with him.
A whole new set of worries slammed into me. Shit, what would my grandfather do to Vin? It had been one thing when I’d just been an owl, never giving Vin any concrete proof that I was a shifter. Now, I’d done it again. I’d shifted in front of another human. There was no way my grandfather was going to overlook that.
“Vin, you might be in danger too. I think if you get out of here now, go home, I can downplay your role in all this. He’ll just put the elan back and….” I struggled with all the emotions that surged through me.
“Hang on.” Vin shook his head. “We’re in this together, remember? We’re going to face him, make him realize he’s wrong about you. You’ve done nothing to put your clan at risk. You shifted the first time to save the life of a fellow shifter, and this time, you did it because you trusted me. No matter what you say, I am not going to stand by and let him put another elan in you.”
I opened and closed my mouth, words deserting me. Vin had no idea. None.
“Now, I have a theory,” he went on, and pulled a small, purple, triangular shaped piece of plastic out of his pocket. “This is what the vet removed.”
I felt the breath go out of me in shock. I leaned back and took a few deep breaths of oxygen. The elan. I was looking at the elan. The thing that had held me captive for three years. The thing I had carried around inside my body, had flown with, had cursed and screamed and cried at. And had finally learned to live with. Right in front of me, in Vin’s hand. All I could do was stare.
“It just looks like a guitar pick to me.” Vin turned it over in his fingers a few times, then offered it to me.
I yanked away like it was a poisonous snake. “Vin, dammit. That thing enslaved me. Destroy it. Flush it down the toilet. Get it away from me.”
“Hang on, calm down,” he said. “You’re just as hysterical in human form, aren’t you?” He was giving me the “you’re such an adorable owl” smile.
“Vin, you—you don’t have magic. You can’t be affected by it. You—”
“Are you, right now? Can you feel anything from it?”
I calmed down enough to send a tendril of power toward Vin’s hand even though it made my head pound to do it. Nothing. No resonance of evil, no threat of danger. Nothing to indicate that this wasn’t a simple guitar pick. But that was impossible.
I didn’t care. I was still afraid to touch it in case it somehow insinuated itself back inside me all on its own.
“God, Vin, you’ve got to get out of here,” I said, sitting up and making my head
spin. “You don’t understand the danger. And then I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Dude. Hold on. You’re overreacting.”
I struggled to get my legs over the side of the bed. Tubes or no tubes, I had to make sure my grandfather never found Vin.
Though where that would be, I had no idea.
“Gabriel.”
Vin used my name for the first time. I couldn’t help but stop struggling and look at him.
“Lie down. You almost died. You’re staying here and getting the full course of antibiotics.”
“I’d rather die than have him do anything to you.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” Vin hissed under his breath. “But I am afraid of Dr. Locere.”
He had a point. I collapsed and let him get the blanket back over me. He’d put the damn elan back in his pocket.
I was too weak to do anything except breathe for the moment, so Vin said, “The point I’m trying to make here is that I don’t think this is the elan.”
“What?” That was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. “It came out of my back. Now I can shift. Isn’t that proof?”
Vin shrugged. “Do elans look like guitar picks?”
“I don’t know—I was unconscious when my grandfather put it in.”
“So you’ve never actually seen one?”
“Well, no. But everybody knows about elans.”
“But has anyone, aside from your grandfather, ever seen one?”
I shrugged. “Well, not that I ever heard, but….”
“Has anyone except you ever gotten one?”
“Well, not in my memory, but… I never heard anybody say what they looked like, but then I never asked.”
“Does the leader make them, or does he have a store of them somewhere?”
I shrugged. “Vin, what difference does it make? Believe me, my grandfather put an elan in my back, and it kept me from shifting form. Maybe that guitar pick wasn’t it, but something was, believe me. Why, do you think it’s one of yours, and the vet was right, and I rolled on it?”